The lowly copy editor

I'm a ":" guy.

 

I've known a lot of :s in my newspapering days.

 

I guess my question is, where does page designer fit in all this?

The newspapers that can afford design "specialists" -- people who design, don't edit -- are truly in the minority.

The places where they "lay out" pages -- which reads like throwing everything toward a page and hope it falls in the right order -- seems to be getting most of the lip service.

My title is copy editor. But I know damn well that if I didn't take page design seriously, try to go the extra mile on that, I'd hear about it in a hurry. And I should.

(Sorry, Dye, wherever you are. )

 

That was basically the point I was trying to make. This world where copy editors only worry about typos and not actually putting out a paper is an unknown one to me.

 

This. This guy plainly has no idea how a copy desk actually functions or how a newspaper is put together. The "laying out" in little quotes, like it wasn't an all-consuming job that the paper wouldn't exist without, brings that home. As does, sadly, the line about guys working at the same paper for 40+ years. Not to mention, the copy editors I've worked with generally had primary responsibility for getting stories online post-editing (unless it was a breaking clusterf*ck the reporter had to frantically post themselves, and then they'd get to update it to fix the many errors).

 

I removed the "I'm in my 32nd," because I didn't want it to sound like bragging. It's not. It's just the way things panned out.

 

Beat me to it, so I'll go with this one:

 

To be honest, this entire passage made my blood boil a little bit.

Why don't you just equate page design with garbage collection and be done with it? I didn't really know that it was a job people run away from ...

 

Fixed.

 

That is literally my biggest thing, Biscayne. I always split that shit. I just read it better that way, so it never jumps out at me. "would never worry" sounds better to me than "never would worry."

I miss probably 90 percent of those that come to me. Thankfully, most of our writers never even try for those.